Nov 30, 2016 | Compliance, Legal, and Malpractice, Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory Instruments & Laboratory Equipment, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Laboratory Testing, Management & Operations
A university research team and a global diagnostics company simultaneously but independently unveil two new tests that accurately identify people predisposed to Alzheimer’s at earlier stages in the disease
Medical laboratory scientists and clinical pathologists have long awaited an accurate and clinically-useful test for the predisposition and early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Now comes pioneering efforts from two organizations that suggest real progress is being made.
One organization is an academic center and the other is an in vitro company. It was a research team at Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine (RowanSOM) that announced development of the first blood test to use the body’s own immune system to detect mild cognitive impairment (MCI), an early stage of Alzheimer’s disease.
Similarly, research scientists for Randox Laboratories unveiled to pathologists, clinical laboratory leaders, and others attending the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) Annual Scientific Meeting, how their biochip-based technology also could be used to detect elevated risk for Alzheimer’s disease. (more…)
Nov 23, 2016 | Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Laboratory Testing, Management & Operations
With more medical laboratories making progress on improving the operational performance of their labs, and the level of service they provide to their clients, they are finding it essential to have real-time analytics and healthcare relationship management systems
In today’s world of clinical laboratory medicine, the pace of daily operations continues to increase. Everything happens faster as the nation’s leading medical laboratories apply Lean and other process improvement methods to speed up workflow with the goal of shortening lab test turnaround times.
However, those labs making progress on doing more faster and in less time have a challenge: they require information systems and software that can feed essential information to lab managers and staff in real time. It is for this reason that some of the best-selling informatics products in the clinical laboratory industry these days are middleware solutions and healthcare relationship management (HRM) solutions that support real-time analytics and help medical labs improve their client service.
In the past, clinical laboratories and pathology groups often developed in-house solutions to help manage data and generate reports. While data in these systems often drove diagnostic decisions, with the pace of technological change and demands for reduced turnaround times (TATs), these systems often struggled to provide: (more…)
Nov 21, 2016 | Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Laboratory Testing, Management & Operations
Topics discussed ranged from ongoing cutbacks in funding for healthcare services, and integration of clinical care to growing use of genetic testing in support of precision medicine
DATELINE: Sydney, NSW, Australia—There were 200 leaders in healthcare, medicine, and pathology gathered here last Wednesday to explore a hot topic: the unfolding disruption to healthcare in Australia. The themes of the conference will be familiar to Dark Daily readers across the globe.
These themes included:
• Inadequate funding to pay hospitals, physicians, and medical laboratories, given the steady increase in demand for healthcare services throughout Australia.
• Expanded use of genetic testing and next-generation gene sequencing as medical laboratories acquire the instruments and expertise necessary to make such tests available to physicians.
• How primary care physicians are responding to the demands of an aging population, the increased incidence of chronic disease, and the potential to use information technologies to improve patient care. (more…)
Nov 18, 2016 | Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory Instruments & Laboratory Equipment, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology
If this medical imaging collaborative develops a way to use the unstructured data in radiology images and anatomic pathology reports, it could create a new revenue stream for pathologists
Unstructured data has been regularly recognized as one Achilles heel for the anatomic pathology profession. It means invaluable information about the cancers and other diseases diagnosed by surgical pathologists are “locked up,” making it difficult for this information to be accessed in efforts to advance population health management (PHM) or conduct clinical studies.
Similarly, medical imaging has an essential role in the diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. And, like most anatomic pathology reports, medical imaging also is considered to be “unstructured” by data experts because it is not easily accessible by computers, reported Fortune magazine.
Unstructured Data in Anatomic Pathology and Radiology
Now one of the world’s largest information technology companies wants to tackle the challenge of unstructured data in radiology images. IBM (NYSE: IBM) Watson Health launched a global initiative involving 16 health systems, radiology providers, and imaging technology companies.
The Watson Health medical imaging collaborative is working to apply cognitive computing of radiology images to clinical practice. IBM aims to transform how physicians use radiology images to diagnose and monitor patients. (more…)
Nov 16, 2016 | Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory Instruments & Laboratory Equipment, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Laboratory Testing
Machine learning software may help pathologists make earlier and more accurate diagnoses
In Boston, two major academic centers are teaming up to apply big data and machine learning to the problem of diagnosing cancers earlier and with more accuracy. It is research that might have major implications for the anatomic pathology profession.
A collaborative effort between teams at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has resulted in an innovation that could result in more accurate diagnoses in the pathology laboratory. The teams have been working on a machine learning software program that will eventually function as an artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the accuracy of diagnostics. They hope to someday build AI-powered computer systems that can accurately and quickly interpret pathology images. (more…)
Nov 14, 2016 | Compliance, Legal, and Malpractice, Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Management & Operations
All hospital laboratories will be part of these programs, and it is an opportunity for medical laboratory professionals to deliver considerable value, as hospitals take steps to improve the utilization of antibiotics
Clinical laboratories and pharmacies in the nation’s hospitals and health systems have a huge opportunity to deliver substantial value in patient care. That’s because, at the start of 2017, hospitals must put effective antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASPs) in place to meet the new accreditation requirements of Medicare and The Joint Commission.
Overuse and inappropriate use of antibiotics is now considered one of the biggest problems in medicine. “Antibiotics are lifesaving drugs, and if we continue down the road of inappropriate use we’ll lose the most powerful tool we have to fight life-threatening infections,” stated Tom Frieden, MD, MPH, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Administrator, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), in a press release issued by the CDC last May. “Losing these antibiotics would undermine our ability to treat patients [who have] deadly infections, cancer, provide organ transplants, and save victims of burns and trauma.”
Much publicity is devoted to the rise of the increase of antibiotic-resistant organisms. In recognition of this problem, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and The Joint Commission (TJC), took steps to add antimicrobial stewardship program requirements to their respective hospital accreditation programs. (more…)
